October 7, 2016 Comments Off on How Well-Meaning Intelligent People End Up in a Cult, When ‘Religious Freedom’ Leaves Children Dead, Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

How Well-Meaning, Intelligent People End Up in a Cult
Sep 26, 2016 Video by The Atlantic
EnlightenNext was an organization, founded by self-styled guru Andrew Cohen, that aimed to facilitate spiritual awakening. Cohen’s most devoted students meditated for hours—at times, months—on end, were often celibate, and lived together. However, what started as an idealistic venture quickly turned into a complicated, often-sinister world that revolved around Cohen. The story of EnlightenNext’s rise and fall begs a deeper question: How do otherwise well-intentioned and rational people end up in a cult? In this documentary, The Atlantic talks to former members, as well as Cohen himself, about their stories in order to uncover the life span of a new religious movement that, after 27 years, collapsed nearly overnight.
Authors: Jaclyn Skurie, Nicolas Pollockhttp://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/501413/life-and-death-of-a-cult/When ‘Religious Freedom’ Leaves Children Dead
Many states don’t consider it “abuse” to rely on faith healings when kids get sick. Why isn’t this a bigger issue? Emma Green
….Crank “knew there was a problem” with the “grapefruit-sized tumor” on her daughter’s shoulder. But she believed Jesus “was the only Healer,” she said, “and through that belief we took it in our hands to pray for her, to heal her with prayer.”
It did not work. After the walk-in-clinic nurse called the police and Jessica was taken to the hospital, she was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. Getting medical care sooner likely wouldn’t have saved her, but it would have helped manage her symptoms and “positively impacted the quality of her life,” her pediatric oncologist testified. Jessica died in state custody at the age of 15.
Crank was found guilty of misdemeanor child neglect, along with the man she was living with, Ariel Ben Sherman, who had founded a small prayer group called the Universal Life Church a year earlier in Lenoir City. Their defense, they argued, was right in the Tennessee Code Annotated: Under state law, it wasn’t considered abuse or neglect for parents to seek “treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone” in lieu of medical care for their kids.
The case made it all the way up to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Sherman died while the case was on appeal, but Crank’s conviction was upheld: Because she wasn’t part of a “recognized church or religious denomination,” the Court held, she wasn’t entitled to the faith-healing defense. Her sentence was affirmed: Eleven months and 29 days, to be served on unsupervised probation.
The Court didn’t strike down the law, but one year later, the Tennessee legislature acted. This spring, it quietly repealed the faith-healing exemption in its child-neglect law, becoming one of just a handful of states that don’t provide any religious exemptions to civil or criminal charges of child neglect or abuse.
….Of all the people governments act to protect, children are perhaps the most vulnerable. Despite federal laws that seek to protect kids under 18 from neglect and abuse, there is no one definition across states of what “abuse” actually means, especially when it comes to families who rely on prayer and faith healings in place of medical care. In some places, if a child is injured, or dies, parents can use their state’s religious exemption as a defense against criminal charges.
The federal government started pushing states to pass these laws starting in 1974 under Richard Nixon’s administration. Largely because of lobbying efforts by Christian Scientists, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which later became the Department of Health and Human Services, determined that parents who don’t seek traditional medical care for their kids for religious reasons should not be held negligent. The agency threatened to withhold federal funding from states that didn’t allow similar accommodations. One by one, states codified religious defenses into their child abuse, endangerment, and neglect laws. Even as federal law has changed over the years, most of these laws have stayed on the books, equally distributed across states red and blue.http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/child-abuse-religious-exemptions-tennessee/503063/

How to Avoid Being Mind Controlled at a Conference by Neil Brick – Presentation at the 2016 Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference – August 2016
The information in this article was written with the help and research of several survivors and well-known, well-published therapists in the child abuse, ritual abuse and mind control fields over almost a twenty year period. Participants of several ritual abuse conferences helped research the information in this article.https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2016-conference/how-to-avoid-being-mind-controlled-at-a-conference/